Cultural Warfare : Is support for the arts just another example of big-government excess? : ART LESSONS: The Rise and Fall of Public Arts Funding, <i> By Alice Goldfarb Marquis (Basic Books: $25; 304 pp.)</i>

In 1983, I participated in a symposium of two dozen art critics organized by the National Endowment for the Arts to evaluate its tiny grant program in art criticism. The 10-year-old program was a mess; the meeting was meant to recommend a course of action.

In reality, the gathering turned out to be an opening salvo fired by political conservatives against the very concept of public funding for the arts.

The symposium was a setup. NEA Chairman Frank Hodsoll, a non-arts bureaucrat swept into the post by the Reagan Revolution, had his staff choose the participants. Hilton Kramer, perhaps the agency’s harshest antagonist, was the one critic Hodsoll insisted they invite. Former art critic for the New York Times, Kramer was (and is) editor of the neoconservative journal, the New Criterion, whose late publisher Samuel Lipman then sat on the presidentially appointed National Council for the Arts, which oversees the NEA.

The 24 writers were asked in advanced to refrain from writing articles about the symposium after it was over, in order to encourage the free flow of unencumbered argument. The meeting was lively, and overhaul suggestions ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime; but none supported maintaining the grant program in its present form.

Missing from the final discussions was Kramer. He had left early to meet his magazine deadline. A certain annoyance greeted the publication of the New Criterion not long after, with Kramer’s lead essay, “Criticism Endowed: Reflections on a Debacle,” and its grotesque misrepresentation of the symposium as a self-serving claque clamoring for the status quo. The article was distributed by Lipman literally hot off the presses to the National Council. The criticism grant-program was promptly abolished--the first casualty in what would later be dubbed the Culture Wars.

I recount this sorry tale of duplicity for two reasons. One is that a version of it is recounted in Alice Goldfarb Marquis’ new book, “Art Lessons: Learning From the Rise and Fall of Public Arts Funding.” The other is that Marquis’ book is itself an example of how, as culture wars continue to rage, ideological manipulation is regularly passed off as high-minded analysis.

Kramer’s false and malicious article is the sole source for Marquis’ account of what was, in retrospect, a pivotal event in the hotly debated recent history of public arts-funding. Her reckoning is brief, erroneous and unverified by any cross-referencing of sources. I hope research is conducted with more meticulous thoroughness at the University of California, San Diego, where the author is a visiting scholar in history.

Marquis has apparently learned a lot from the rise and fall of public funding for the arts, although political lessons far outdistance art lessons. Opposition to public arts-funding has mostly come from two sources. One is political conservatives, who regard its birth in the era of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society as symptomatic of big-government excess; the other is religious conservatives, whose fundamentalism is at odds with the skepticism inherent to the arts in the modern era.

In general, the former are uneasy with the role of government in the arts, the latter uneasy with the role of the arts in government. Together they have skillfully created the pandemonium of the past six years, which has brought the NEA to the brink.

Marquis’ pseudo-history pays virtually no attention to either clan. Unmentioned is the neoconservative crowd that has diddled mostly behind the scenes (William Kristol, former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, among them). Of the two religious conservatives who publicly marshaled their well-organized followers to the cause, Rev. Donald E. Wildmon rates a single sentence, while Rev. Pat Robertson rates none.

Which is not to say Marquis doesn’t rely on both conservative camps to construct her story. In addition to Kramer’s screed, her “authoritative” sources include a tract from the conservative Heritage Foundation--written by a consultant now employed by the Family Research Council, a fundamentalist Christian organization, whose outlandish assertions--for instance--made the report a public laughingstock when issued in 1991.

What makes “Art Lessons” a pseudo-history is the author’s unembarrassed bias against the concept of public funding. It skews her research. She lays out the mostly liberal political web within which the idea came to fruition in the 1960s; but the absence of similar analysis of the mostly conservative milieu within which it has lately unraveled falsely makes the subject appear inevitably bedeviled.

The real flaw is Marquis’ cultural myopia. She repeats the common wisdom that by the 1960s a Cold War desire to demonstrate the triumph of American civilization had created unprecedented support for a federal role in culture. Ignoring post-Cold War politics, however, she leaves the bizarre impression that, since the United States won, federal patronage is now unnecessary.

The varied governments of virtually every major civilization in world history have patronized the arts, so its absence from our democratic form of government was plainly aberrant. Marquis, however, presents our overdue creation of such patronage as the fluke.

Pretending to comprehensiveness, she chronicles some of Richard Nixon’s self-serving motives for expanding the NEA budget more than any other president. But she betrays her sympathies with an appalling claim that Nixon initially had to delay his arts advocacy as he “struggled to extricate more than half a million American troops from bloody engagements in Vietnam.” This vulgar spin might please Henry Kissinger, but after Nixon came to power 20,000 American soldiers died and the war expanded into Cambodia.

I admired Marquis’ first book, “Hopes and Ashes: The Birth of Modern Times” (1986), about the 1930s emergence of mass culture. Surprisingly, mass culture assumes a ludicrous role in “Art Lessons.” Marquis’ uses audience popularity to measure public arts-funding’s success. Why spend millions of tax dollars on the arts, she asks, if relatively few Americans respond to them with enthusiasm?

Marquis is unaware that art’s success is not gauged by consumers. It is gauged by producers--that is, by other artists . Picasso is not a giant of the 20th Century because the public adores little brown Cubist paintings, but because Picasso’s generation of artists recognized they had to deal with what Picasso had wrought. That’s how he changed the world.

Artists lead the culture, they don’t follow it. Public arts-funding that doesn’t understand that priority is bound to flop. Marquis’ scheme to create a new government system of grants to neighborhood impresarios instead of artists, crudely outlined in her final chapter, is a management blueprint for failure.

Can a persuasive case be made for abolishing federal arts funding? Probably--just as there can for reforming the system now in place. Neither is in “Art Lessons.”